I have a main working drive, a backup drive for storing RAW files, and burn them to CD as well. You can never have too much backup. And for gods sake, dont delete your RAW files after you work through the images...equivilant to cutting up your negatives. Only point that out as I have heard of a couple of photographers doing just that.

1. After shooting I download to hard drive. 2. I immediately copy RAW unedited files to two DVDs and send one DVD offsite. 3. Now if I need to use the CF card, I can format it for the next job or just leave it on the card for additional safety. 4. At this point I have one set of files on the hard drive, one DVD on site, and one DVD off site.

I not only keep them on my desktop hard drive and CDs, but I also have an external hard drive that I keep the originals on. I've gone as far as keeping original work from a trip, on my laptop until my next trip, just in case. If I pick a few to print, after a little "tweaking", I'll back them up a couple of times too.

I keep all photos on a second physical hard drive (D:) since the primary (C:) drive generally has more problems requiring reformatting. Every year or so I buy a new hard drive (double the size; same price) and copy EVERYTHING from the old D: drive to the new one. I then take the old drive and put it in the safe with all of the photos still on it. That way everything old is available, yet backed up in a secure location should the worst happen.

I have a second external hard drive which I copy my photos onto. When a group of files is large enough to fill a dvd, I burn a dvd and store it safely. My computer hard drive crashed and I didn't lose anything.

My primary organizer is ACDsee. The images are rated and sorted by format. Once they have been sorted and worked over (as required), all the files are backed up to DVD-RAM or archived to DVD-ROM. ACDsee allows searching of off-line media for quick reference.

Once they are backed up to CDs, I back them up to an external hard drive. I keep buying additional hard drives as they fill up. I once read that the only device that we still use since we went digital is the hard drive. The first ones still can be used. 5 1/2" Floppy is gone, CD's will phase out to DVDs, but we will still be using hard drives.

I make a named file and save the pictures to that file. I then save it to a CD. When everything is done I save My whole project to A couple of DVD disks.All finished photo's and all of the out of camera files are always dated named and most important is they are always kept together.

I'm getting used to Adobe Bridge and rating my images as well as adding keywords for searches. Will also be purchased an external hard drive at some point for backup. Also faithfully burn to DVDs and keep them in cataloged albums.

I manage my collection utilizing iMatch, it's extremely powerful and I would be lost without it. I copy all my captures from card to one of my hard drives in my system (seperate from the operating system), once a week I back up to an external hard drive (also managed by iMatch). Once a collection of photo's is two year's old (2003) I back that year up to DVD-RAM and remove it from the hard drive in my system.

I couldn't imagine doing without the Organizier that comes with Photoshop Elements 4. I edit my RAW files with Nikon Capture 4.x, export them to tiff and then have Elements convert them to PSD and drop them into the organizer. They stay there as I switch back and forth between the organizer and the editor. I can do pretty much everything I want from organizing, editing, exporting, and even printing from within Elements 4. What more can you ask for?